Los Angeles ? Hollywood lived its own second-chance “Rocky” story this summer as a business that looked to be going down for the count two years ago rebounded with record revenue and an unparalleled string of blockbuster hits.

The movie industry had its first $4 billion summer and will finish with a haul of about $4.15 billion from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

That was up 8 percent from last summer and surpassed the previous high of $3.95 billion in summer 2004.

Hollywood did not set a movie attendance record, though. Factoring in annual rises in admission prices, about 606 million tickets were sold this summer, up 3 percent from 2006. But the season was only the sixth-best for modern Hollywood, whose biggest summer for attendance since the golden age of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s came in 2002, when 653.4 million tickets were sold, according to Media By Numbers.

Still, it was a sharp turnaround from summer 2005, when attendance plunged 11.5 percent compared with the previous summer and critics predicted the movie industry would continue to decline as consumers turned to home theaters, video games and other entertainment choices.

“Everyone should be very happy with the result. The movie industry is alive and well, in comparison to maybe what was being said a few years ago,” said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony, which started the summer with a record-breaking $151.1 million opening weekend for “Spider-Man 3” and also released “Superbad,” which is on its way to becoming a $100 million hit.

While there were a couple of box-office underachievers, Hollywood was conspicuously free of outright bombs this summer, unlike two years ago, when the season was littered with flops such as “The Island,” “Stealth” and “The Bad News Bears.”

“It’s a tribute to the fact that we as a collective group paid attention to the audience and made sure that what we put out was satisfying,” said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of distribution for 20th Century Fox. “At the end of the day, it says that if it’s good, they’re going to come. The demise of the movie business is very premature. It’s a healthy business as long as the quality of the movies is there.”

For the full year, movie revenues are up 7 percent and attendance has risen 2.5 percent compared with last year.

But the movie business is fickle, and that momentum could falter through the fall and holidays, when the film schedule is unusually barren of big franchise flicks.